Call centers, such as emergency-services dispatch centers, telemarketing sales centers, customer-service centers, and other automatic call-distribution centers, employ large numbers of human agents to place and/or answer calls. For proper, efficient, and smooth center operation, work schedules must be developed for agents, the schedules must be communicated to the agents, and the agents' adherence to the schedules must be monitored. Presently, some or all of these activities are done manually, by center supervisors. This is slow, inefficient, and consumes an inordinate amount of the supervisors' time which could be better-spent on other activities.
Call centers are typically low-margin, high-volume operations, and therefore even small improvements in efficiency can have a significant effect on the centers' commercial viability. Realizing this, suppliers of call-center systems have automated some of these activities to make them more efficient and to unload the supervisors of their burden. Thus, call-management systems, which monitor call-center activity and issue reports thereon to the supervisor, have been introduced. Also introduced have been scheduling systems, which generate agent schedules based upon the reports generated by the call-management systems. While these advances have considerably improved the efficiency of call-center operations, further advances continue to be sought.